Not
so long ago, Time Magazine was big and important. Now it’s about
the size of a 10-cent Mickey Mouse comic book, circa 1959, only not as
relevant.

To try
to get people to read Time like they used to, the editors have employed
a new strategy: think of something really outrageous, and slap it on the
cover. Voila—instant buzz!

A few
weeks ago, everybody was talking about Time because its cover displayed
a beautiful young woman breast-feeding a boy who was old enough to go
to school, under the eye-catching headline, Are You Mom Enough?
The trick must have worked very well, and now they’ve followed up
with another outrageous cover story for the June 11 issue.

Against
a somber, stark red background—reminiscent of Mao Tse-tung’s
Little Red Book that all the pea-brains (now college professors and members
of the government) used to carry around in 1971—we see the glaring
white headline, How To Die.

For
a moment I thought it must be some new public-service training program
on a par with “How to Sit on Chairs” or something. But it
was a misleading headline. The article is actually about why you ought
to kill your loved ones when they get old and sick.

You
see, bumping off the old and sickly is supposed to save a lot of money
for America. Hospitals or insurers who succeed in convincing people to
allow them to yank Grandma’s feeding tube, so she can die of thirst,
will be in line to receive cash bonuses from Uncle Sam—or is that
Son of Sam? Yessir, it makes no sense to go on spending money to keep
some poor old coot alive, especially if he isn’t paying taxes anymore.
As an added incentive to murder, it is well known that dead people are
a major part of the Democrat voting base.

Really,
though—these Time writers and death panelist wannabes just aren’t
serious about trying to save money. Obviously they haven’t devoted
that much thought to it.

If they
honestly want to save money by whacking people, where could the Grim Reaper
be more profitably employed than up on Capitol Hill and its immediate
environs? In one day, a single U.S. senator can burn through more money
than a whole ward full of sick people can in a year. Whole departments
of the government could be euthanized, saving untold billions of dollars.
You can think of as many as I can. By comparison, at least some poor old
patient who can’t get out of bed is not raising our taxes, bailing
out failed banks, starting wars, banning soda, appointing communist quacks
to serve as federal judges for as long as they live, or dishing out “foreign
aid” to tin-pot dictators and socialist European basket-cases.

But
as long as we’re on a roll for euthanasia—merely for the sake
of saving money—why stop with the government? How much do college
professors cost America, and what do they produce, besides legions of
unemployable young people with meaningless degrees? Our aggregate student
loan debt just passed the trillion-dollar mark this year. Who is a bigger
drain on the national economy—an 85-year-old patient who might be
good for another year, even with the feeding tube; or a 38-year-old tenured
professor of Gender Obfuscation Studies making $150,000 a year with lavish
benefits and a colossal retirement package?

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Speaking
of retirement, consider the large unfunded pensions of public employees.
Someday in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be paying more schoolteachers
more money not to teach than we’ll be paying teachers who teach.
How far do we want to go with that? Yank the feeding tube from public
education!

It is
not to be thought of that those who conceive and operate death panels
will ever be subject to having their plugs pulled. We have a new commandment:
“Thou shalt not kill… politicians, judges, movie stars, gay
activists, bureaucrats, or czars—but everybody else is fair game!”
That means you, my fellow serfs.

Hoorah
for cultural evolution. “Gee whiz, sonny! After all that day care,
and soccer, and public schooling, and TV and video games, how could you
condemn your own momma to die of dehydration?” Or, as the Wisdom
of God put it, “All they that hate me love death.” (Proverbs
8:36)

The
harshest judgment God can give us is to let us stew in the juices of our
own folly. Oh, brave, new, loveless world! And no one but ourselves to
blame for it.

Lee Duigon,
a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper
reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist.
He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new
fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar,
available on www.amazon.com

A few weeks ago,
everybody was talking about Time because its cover displayed a beautiful
young woman breast-feeding a boy who was old enough to go to school, under
the eye-catching headline, Are You Mom Enough?